Tuesday, 18 December 2012

learning to QOOQ

A few days ago, on the universal grapevine that is Twitter,
I saw a flurry of activity surrounding something called a QOOQ. It turns out
that it’s not a new addition to the Star Wars dramatis personae, but a kitchen
recipe gadget of the interactive variety.

Now, at this point, a warning or two. I’m about as
techno-friendly as a lobster with a migraine. Ergo, I don’t possess any iStuff
or equivalent. Nope, not even an iPhone. So if ‘there’s an app for that’, it
ain’t no use to me. I AM LUDDITE.

But. But...the QOOQ
(pronounced ‘cook’ – geddit?) is a dedicated recipe thingy, specifically
designed for kitchen use, being non slip, wipe clean, splash- and humidity-resistant
as it is. And it has a little built-in flip-out stand. So, as much as I’d like
to pretend otherwise, I confess that I am, in fact, mildly interested, despite
the above warnings and latent bah humbug tendencies, especially when faced with
this sort of blurb:

“Each QOOQ comes preloaded with 1,000 international recipes
that can be accessed by cuisine type, difficulty level, preparation time and
ingredients, helping to customise the cooking experience to suit the chef and
his or her kitchen. At the touch of a button, users are also able to purchase
additional recipes, which are available individually or in themed packs and are
focused on such topics as a destination, an ingredient or a specific chef. There is a
catalogue of over 4,000 exclusive multimedia recipes made for QOOQ by more than
100 chefs.”

“Video speed is controlled by the user, and videos can be
paused while the user accesses separate tutorials that explain specific
culinary techniques. There is also behind-the-scene footage of the chefs’
restaurants, as well as hundreds of ingredient fact sheets that detail how
individual products should be chosen, kept and cooked. For the
health-conscious, recipe pages detail the calories contained in a dish and the
Meal Planner function allows users to monitor and vary their diets.”

You get the idea.

Anyway, the first test for the QOOQ is, of course, whether I
can, y’know, set it up and get it to work without assistance. Since it looks and
feels much like an Etch-a-Sketch pad, which I vaguely remember being able to
use, I feel dangerously confident.

Plug it in, turn it on, and...oooh, look, things start happening. So far,
surprisingly competent (me, not the QOOQ). Oh. It needs a WPA code to hook up
t’interwebs. Cue interval of some minutes while said code is located. But then
we’re away.

And I really mean it. It takes absolutely no time at all –
literally – to start finding your way around the QOOQ. It’s a touchscreen
interface, so you simply poke the screen at anything that seems appealing and
take it from there. And appealing, it is. The visuals and text are clear and
bright, and even for a techie numpty like me, it’s instinctive and intuitive to
use, pretty much along the same lines as iStuff and their ilk. If instruction
booklets put the bejasus up you, then you’ll have no such worries here – you
simply don’t need one.

There’s not much the makers haven’t thought of. You can
access recipes by a number of routes – by ingredient, occasion, chef, cuisine, theme,
‘inspiration’, etc. Once you choose what you want, it tells you (under
respective tabs), the method, ingredients, and even the utensils you’ll need. Other
information includes skill level, time to prep and cook, cost, and calorific
content (yikes). Many recipes also incorporate videos to show you how to do anything
remotely tricky – such as boning a fish (and yes, there’s a separate, dedicated
techniques section to the QOOQ, should you need it) – and these can be paused
and re-started as you flip back to the recipe.

Amongst the other plusses is the ability to scale a recipe
up or down at a prod of the screen (I loved this, although it does lead to
anomalies – 2 and 5/8 of a tablespoon?), and a weekly meal planner and
shopping-list maker. The search facility is fast and accurate should you know
what you’re after in the first place. And that’s just for starters. There’s
also a whole section on wines, ingredients, ‘food facts’, and much else
besides.

The QOOQ, then, has a lot going for it.

Having said that, it’s not entirely without flaws as it
stands as the moment.

The recipes themselves show predominantly French and
American influence, so will perhaps come across to an English market as a bit
left-field. (Me, I happen to like that.)All the featured chefs, and their recipes, are French, too, so the
chances are you won’t find (m)any chefs you recognise on the QOOQ at the
moment, although I imagine that will change over time. Other obvious issues
include, for example, the spellings, measurements, ingredients being American
(cups and sticks; cilantro, not coriander, and so on), worryingly vague in
places (e.g. ‘a packet of vanilla sugar’; ‘1 pastry dough’), and the lack of
rhyme or reason as to when a technique is explained/demonstrated or not. Vegetarian
recipes seem to include fish (I suppose this is a French device, after all), ‘world
cuisines’ are rather restricted at the moment, and as for ‘Asian’ recipes, read
chiefly Indian or Japanese.

But I’m being picky – all these niggles are eminently
fixable, and I’m sure the QOOQ team is busy refining as I write this.

The device isn’t limited purely to being a souped-up recipe
‘book’, either. You can use it to access the internet and your (web)mails, and
get instant access via the logo buttons to Facebook, Twitter, Wiki and a few
other common favourites. So can you be busy tweeting away while cooking, but
not have to stop to give your hands a wipe so as not so spoil your iStuff. The
QOOQ’s wipe clean, remember?

So, to the nitty-gritty. The QOOQ retails at a shade under
£250.00, and a year’s subscription costs just over £60.00 (alternatively, you
can buy pay-as-you-go credits). Is it worth it?

For iStuff die-hards, I suspect the price point isn’t quite
right, although I’d still suggest you try to get hold of one and have a play
for yourself before making up your mind. But for someone like me, who’s a gadget-free
zone, but who uses a computer and social media AND likes to cook, it’s a fun
device well worth considering. In my case, it certainly saved on running
between the kitchen and my study like a demented chicken, as is my usual mode.

61 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I can't believe that someone has come up with a tablet computer to tell you how to cook? Okay, so there's going to be some benefit to it, but isn't half the adventure of cooking the fact that you have an adventure in itself- I mean, to be told step by step and not having to dash to the book to turn the page- then where's the fun of leaving sticky finger marks on the cook book?

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